Monday, 20 October 2008

OTTO; or, Up with Dead People

''Once upon a time, in the not too distant future, there unlived a zombie named Otto. It was a time not much different from today when zombies had become, if not commonplace, then certainly unextraordinary. Zombies had evolved over time and become somewhat more refined. They had developed a limited ability to speak, and more importantly, to reason. Some say it was primarily owing to the fact that the practice of embalming had fallen out of favour. Others say it was simply a natural process of evolution. Each new wave of zombies was beaten down and killed by the living who found them to be an irritating and irksome reminder of their own inescapable mortality, not to mention an echo of their own somnambulistic conformist behaviour. But the few zombies who survived annihilation managed to pass on their intelligence they had acquired to subsequent generations, perhaps through some strange telepathy only shared by the dead. Or perhaps by a clandestine guerrilla activity, born out of resistance against the violent and increasing hostilities of the living".

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"Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do; such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe" (David Stove The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies 1991: 188)